The Truest Pleasure
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A "wondrous" novel of a marriage in the Appalachian Mountains, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Gap Creek (San Antonio Express-News).
Ginny and Tom have a lot in common—a love of the land, and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom's father died, but Ginny's father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny's was a childhood of relative security, Tom's one of landlessness. Truth be known—and they both know it—their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own, and Ginny knows she can't manage her aging father's farm by herself.
But there is also mutual attraction, and a growing love as time passes. What keeps getting in the way of it, though, are their obsessions. Tom is a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny is obsessed by Pentecostal preaching. That she loses control of her dignity, that she speaks "in tongues," that she is "saved," seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. It's not until Tom lies unconscious at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that Ginny's truest pleasure comes into focus.
Named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, this novel by a winner of the Thomas Wolfe Prize is filled with "marvelously vivid imagery" and insight into the timeless truths of love and marriage (The New York Times Book Review).
"Morgan deeply understands these people and their world, and he writes about them with an authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century . . . The book is astonishing." —The Boston Book Review
"Simple, eloquent language . . . Pulses with poetry." —The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eloquent, wise and heartbreaking, Morgan's second novel (after The Hinterlands) offers insightful truths about family life and marital relationships through the twangy voice of narrator Ginny Peace, who lives in North Carolina mountain country during the first half of this century. Hill people like Ginny and her family endure dawn-to-dusk labor on the farm and offer thanks for simple pleasures. But Ginny needs another dimension: attending Pentecostal revival meetings where she is moved to speak in tongues is the only way she can satisfy her craving for transcendence. Marriage to hardworking but taciturn Tom Powell and the birth of several children fulfills Ginny for a time, but the intoxicating joy of being ``cleansed by the Spirit'' lures her again and brings an irrevocable rift with Tom, who despises such uncontrolled behavior. They continue to work side by side while their marriage dissolves in misunderstanding, resentment and spite, until a crisis finally helps Ginny understand the dimensions of their mutual love. Morgan's touch in this novel is deft and assured. Rarely has the experience of religious ecstasy been described with such poetic intensity and lack of condescension. In addition, he combines a keen observation of the natural world with a bone-deep knowledge of the traditions and cyclical rites of country life. Homely scenes of domesticity, with bickering born of family tensions and jealousies, are given depth by episodes distinctive of Appalachian culture. The reader is astonished when, after this somewhat desultory recital of the practical details of farm labor and household routine, the action suddenly accelerates into one dramatic, suspenseful scene after another. Ginny becomes a heroic figure: indefatigable, burning with duty born of desperate hope and, finally, struck by a tragic epiphany. This story of unassuming people striving for goodness but alienated from each other by differences in personality and perception of the world cannot fail to pierce the reader with the same poignant, ironic insight Ginny achieves.
